I hope everyone can look back through their days of school or work and can point to a few books, teachers, or mentors and some lessons that still stick out to you. I’m thinking of my junior year English teacher who introduced me to writers whose words still echo years later, or my Christian Ethics professor at North Central whose passion lit something in me. These gifts of insight often arrive at the right time, like a seed planted that continues to grow in ways we couldn’t predict.
For me, one of those seeds was a book I read during my seminary years at Mundelein: Preaching to a Post-Everything World by Zack Eswine, a Protestant pastor. It was part of an elective course in homiletics called Preaching for the New Evangelization, and even though the book came out in 2008 (and what feels like several life cycles ago) I find myself returning to it again and again for advice and help.
We often hear that we’re living in a post-modern or post-Christian world — or even a post-institutional, post-family, or post-truth world. Eswine’s title captures it best: lately it feels like we’re living in a post-everything world.
A question I struggle to answer every single week is: what does it mean to preach — or even just to live faithfully — in a world where everything seems to be unraveling?
As a priest, I live in the same world as everyone else: I scroll the same news feeds, watch the same headlines, and feel the same overwhelm. But, again as a priest, I’m so often asked to help “make sense” of it all. And the truth is, I don’t always know what to say.
How do you preach to a post-everything world?
Every generation faces the collapse of things it once trusted, and the things on which it was built: institutions, customs, technologies, even ways of thinking. The end of the liturgical year gives us this apocalyptic imagery: wars, chaos, families divided, and uncertainty everywhere. (A reminder that “apocalypse” doesn’t mean “fiery, violent end of the world.” That’s armageddon. In Greek, apokalypsis simply means revelation — a revealing of what’s real.)
In a sense, if we ask for the eyes to see, we’re always living in a time of revelation. The world and its leaders, our heroes and those we despise, will show their true colors eventually, and so do we. St. Paul’s admonition this week about those who are more concered with the business of others than their own lives and work is convicting for all of us. It isn’t just them over there who are part of the problem.
When G.K. Chesterton was asked to write an essay on “What’s Wrong with the World,” he famously replied with two words: “I am.” That insight still hits home. Much of what frustrates us in the world reflects what we struggle with in ourselves.
Much of our struggle and discontent, with the world and with ourselves, comes from the subconscious (and sometimes conscious) desire to “be about” something that will withstand the test of time. And deep down, we know our political parties are just playing us in their will to power, and the influencer economy is just playing us in their will to pleasure, while we are left to fend for ourselves in our pursuit of real meaning and authenticity in life and relationships.
Eswine’s point is that anything that isn’t rooted in God, particularly in the event of Christ, will eventually pass away.
That sounds stark, but it’s also freeing. Our politics will shift. Our technology will age. Our institutions will change their values. Even the world we know now, that we are toiling so hard to create and maintain — our homes, careers, and routines — will someday look completely different.
I think of my grandparents and the more “chronologically mature” parishioners, who look at the modern world with a mix of wonder and confusion. They lived before microwaves, before the Internet, before smartphones. When missing Mass was unthinkable, when family dinners were non-negotiable, when the home was a safe-haven to be cultivated, and when the world felt safe.
Everything changes — except God and the things he’s revealed through his Son.
That’s not to say we should retreat from the world, but rather that we should learn to hold it lightly. Many of us have many cookies currently being stored in the wrong jars. If you invest everything in ideology or identity or possessions, the jars will break…and without something meaningful as a foundation, not only will you find yourself at a total loss for meaning, you will also be out of cookies!
Only one relationship, one Person, will can withstand the test of time.
So ask yourself:
What in my life will withstand the test of time?
Am I banking on things that will fade, or am I building my life on something eternal?
This doesn’t mean simply doubling down on religious routines or adding a 47th rosary to your day. Faith isn’t a numbers & statistics kind of enterprise. As the old saying goes, going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. Atheists have soup kitchens, and really terrible people give to charity.
Faith begins in the recognition of a Presence — something greater than ourselves that draws us out of doom-scrolling and distraction into communion. Communion with God. Communion with one another. And this communion reshapes our priorities, our schedules, our relationships, and our way of life.
Happily, being Catholic means something extraordinary: tangible signs of grace.
We can touch, taste, smell, and see what we believe. Bells and incense, bread and wine, Advent wreaths and candles — these things root us in the reality of God.
As Advent approaches, maybe the invitation is simple: slow down.
Pray as a family. Light the wreath. Put the phone down during dinner. Look up from the feed of everyone else’s life and be present in your own. Go for a walk and leave your phone at home.
When we live this way, the coming of God is no longer something to fear. It becomes something to welcome…a relief, even. Because in the end, only He will be fully what we are hoping our politicians, influencers, family, and friends, and ourselves, can be: just, honest, consistent, sincere, and true.
Everything else will fade.
Living in a post-everything world isn’t the tragedy it seems to be. Maybe it’s simply the world revealing itself for what it’s always been — fragile, fleeting, and hungry for something eternal.
And maybe that’s the good news we’ve been missing: that in a world where everything unravels and fades, God alone withstands the test of time.
